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Founded in July 2005, Mashable is the world's largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news. Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what's new on the web and offering social media resources and guides.

One of the best things about Twitter is the way that it allows content and information to spread quickly across the network from person-to-person. This happened for two reasons: 1. because Twitter is a one-to-many communications platform and 2. because it allows for content to be easily repeated. In fact, the latter led to what we call the “retweet.” It’s safe to say that the founders of Twitter did not initially envision this as a use for their platform, but the retweet convention organized itself organically and was embraced by third-party apps.

Unfortunately, retweets were messy for a couple of ways. First, because of the 140 character limit placed on tweets, retweeting someone else’s content sometimes meant editing their text in order to ensure that the customary “RT” and “@username” attributions fit. Second, because there’s often overlap in who we follow, retweets many times led to redundancy in your timeline as more than one of the people you followed retweeted the same content. So a couple of days ago, Twitter rolled out a solution in the form of a completely new retweet system.

Retweets: Old vs. New

Retweeting someone used to be a completely manual process. You had to copy and paste their tweet, add the “RT” designation, and the “@username” attribution, then click the “update” button. Some third party Twitter clients had built-in retweet buttons, which would automatically add the proper attribution and designation text. Many times you would need to edit the original retweeted text in order to make it fit within Twitter’s 140 character limit. (This was because adding the “RT” and “@username” text would often push the tweet over the limit.)

The old style of retweets also led to redundancy within your timeline. For example, I follow a number of people that also follow @mashable. Many of these people routinely retweet Mashable stories, so whenever the @mashable account tweets a new link, my Twitter timeline is often filled with multiple identical retweets.

Twitter’s new official retweet feature fixes both of these issues. Now, instead of retweets being appended with the “RT” text designation, they have a special retweet icon. Further, they come directly from the original tweeter’s account — regardless of whether you are following that person. If one of your followers retweets User X, you’ll see that tweet in your timeline, with the icon designating it as a retweet and a message telling you which if your followers retweeted that tweet.

Further, Twitter has fixed the redundancy issue by grouping together identical retweets. You’ll only see that tweet appear in your timeline once, but the message telling you who retweeted it will let you know which two or more of your followers retweeted.

Is this good or bad? Twitter’s new retweets are undeniably cleaner and more organized than the original, manual method. Your timeline will be easier to read and less noisy as a result, and the new API means that third-party clients can build in native retweeting in a much cleaner way (some already have). Also, you no longer need to edit original tweet text, which means it is less likely you’ll anger someone by inadvertently changing the meaning of their original tweet or messing up the attribution.

However, it can also be somewhat jarring to see people you’re not following in your timeline, and the new retweets lack the ability to add commentary to retweets. In the past, when retweeting something, users would often add their own two cents before the “RT” text. Adding comments is not supported by the current implementation of retweets on Twitter (though there is a chance it will be in the future).

How To Retweet

Retweeting works a lot like replying to tweets from the web interface. If you hover your cursor over a tweet — in either your timeline or on any user’s profile page, a “Retweet” link will appear directly to the right of the “Reply” link that has always been there. To retweet the tweet, all you have to do is click on the link.

But then what happens? The tweet you just retweeted will appear in the timelines of your friends regardless of whether they follow the original tweeter. If you think twice about your retweet, you can undo it. To manage your retweets, click on the “Retweets” link in the right hand side navigation. That will bring you to a page with three tabs:

– Retweets by others – These are all the retweets by the people you follow. They’re arranged loosely by time, but the most retweeted posts tend to bubble to the top of the list. From here you can reply to or retweet any of the tweets listed

– Retweets by you – This tab shows all of the tweets that you have retweeted. From here you can reply to tweets or undo your retweet (simply hover over the tweet and click the “Undo” link that appears).

– Your tweets, retweeted – These are your original tweets that others have retweeted. From here you can delete your tweets. You can also see who retweeted you, and when.

While there is no way to turn retweets off completely, there are two ways to block retweets from from appearing your timeline on a user by user basis. If you block a user, you won’t see their retweets in your timeline, even if someone you’re following retweets that user. You can also block retweets that a user you are following makes from appearing your timeline.

To turn off retweets from a specific user, visit their profile page and click on the circular green retweet button that appears next to the “Following” message at the top of their page. Once you click on the button, it will turn grey, indicating that retweets from that user will no longer appear in your timeline. You can toggle this option on and off using this button.

What Twitter Hopes to Accomplish

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams wrote recently that he hopes the new retweet feature will solve the problems of attribution confusion, messy or broken messages, and will reduce timeline noise. Williams said that the new retweet feature should “make Twitter a more powerful system for helping people find out what’s happening now that they care about.”

If embraced by users and third-party Twitter clients, there is almost no way to imagine that wouldn’t be the case. However, the inability to add comments to retweets is an issue that Twitter may need to address, especially to appeal to the power users who often shape the use of the platform and evangelize it to others.

What do you think of Twitter’s new retweet feature so far? Let us know in the comments.

Reviews: Mashable, Twitter

Tags: how to, List, Lists, retweet, retweets, twitter

If you’ve been on the web long enough, you’ll know that Twitter isn’t the first startup to have suffered scaling issues: the auction site had significant problems keeping the servers humming in its early days.

Today eBay is giving users a small reminder of that era: eBay’s search engine is down, meaning goods cannot be found without using the category structure.

With the holiday shopping season ramping up, eBay will be losing significant revenue through the downtime: no doubt its engineers are working the weekend to get things working again.

Are you having trouble with eBay search? Let us know in the comments.

Reviews: eBay

If you’re looking to bring Facebook to the Windows desktop and Twitter-centric update tools like Seesmic or TweetDeck are too limiting for you, you might want to take Fishbowl for a spin.

The app, built on Microsoft Silverlight 4, features photo browsing and zoom, photo slideshows, drag-and-drop image uploads and a completely ad-free way to browse and update the news feed. It works on XP, Vista and Windows 7, and just became available for download.

We’re already more addicted to Facebook than could be considered healthy, not to mention our affection for the Mac, but for those Windows users looking for a rich desktop experience, our friends at Download Squad are calling Fishbowl a “kick-ass Facebook client for Windows 7” – it’s free and built by Microsoft’s own developers, so it might be worth taking for a spin.

[Images via Download Squad]

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook, fishbowl

The finals of our annual Open Web Awards are hotly contested, with 170,000+ votes cast since Wednesday. Among the most active categories: the top videos and channels on YouTube.

Popular YouTube channel CardGamesFTW has a strategy to help it beat out the competition: turtles. At least, a humorous clip linking turtles, Facebook and people called “Steve” aspires to drive more votes for the channel in the “Funniest YouTube Channel” category.

The competition is tough, however: competitors include top YouTubers ShaneDawsonTV, Smosh, loadingreadyrun and RayWilliamJohnson.

If you’d like to vote for or against CardGamesFTW this year, head over to the Open Web Awards site, and remember you can vote once per category per day.

Cast your votes in Mashable’s Open Web Awards 2009 >>

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: trending, turtles, youtube